The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  I watched him for a while, then pulled the covers up over him and crawled into bed myself. Any way you sliced it, this behavior was not a good sign. But dammit, we were having a garage sale. Not to mention a baby. And I had to get some sleep.

  5

  Five o’clock came too soon after that. My alarm went off and I startled awake, leaping up and pulling my inner-thigh muscles for the thousandth time. The midwife had explained the inner-thigh situation to me very cheerfully: “Your body is relaxing and getting loosened up for the birth.” That was me. Loose and relaxed. So much so that I could barely get in and out of bed without groaning. Another reason to poke Dean.

  “Hey.” I poked him.

  Dean did not move.

  “Hey. It’s time to get up.”

  Dean had a pillow on top of his head. I took it off. “Hey!”

  “No, no, no.” He put his hand over his face. He was literally sweating alcohol.

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” I said. I maneuvered out of bed and flipped on all the lights as I left the room.

  Teeth brushed and fanny pack fastened (I went with above-the-belly), I left the coffeepot brewing and headed to the garage to start bringing small things out. Dean would have to get the fold-out tables and the display shelves later. I’d just start moving the merchandise.

  And so there I was, a lumbering shadow on the dark lawn, trudging up and down our cracked driveway and skimming my sneakers through the dewy grass. It was absolutely black outside. I carried a flashlight, which just made things seem blacker. It made me feel jumpy to be out there alone, unable to see. After I almost screamed when I snapped a stick in the grass, I decided to go check on my man.

  Fast asleep. Now with my pillow over his head. I brought him some coffee and set it on the bedside table.

  “Let’s move,” I said to him. “It’s spooky out there alone.”

  But Dean didn’t move. And when I tried to take the pillow, he was ready. He grabbed it and held it in place.

  “Come on,” I said.

  Finally, the pillow moved a little. “I’m not getting up,” Dean said.

  “Here’s your coffee, and I’ve got your jeans—”

  “I’m not getting up.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m really not.”

  I didn’t know what to say. This was really, truly something I couldn’t do by myself.

  “How am I supposed to move the tables and stuff?” I said. “How, exactly, am I supposed to do that, with my giant, pregnant, dinosaur belly?”

  “I’ll get them later.”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling frantic, “but later, the garage sale will be over.”

  I waited for a response. Nothing. After a few minutes, he pulled the pillow back over his head.

  I stood up. I couldn’t move those tables without him. Or any of the furniture. Or the papier-mâché horse, or the potted banana tree. All the big-ticket items would remain piled in our one-bulb garage. Drive-bys wouldn’t stop for a grassy yard strewn with knickknacks. People stop only for the big stuff. So the day would come and go, and I’d still be stuck with the navy-and-brown couch, the mold-speckled Persian rug, the rattan plant stand, and the particle-board bookshelf. Not to mention that after all these months of planning and waiting, I’d have made none of the money that was supposed to finance a changing table, a diaper pail, a stroller, and a crib, at the minimum. Instead, I’d have a life full of crap.

  I grabbed the pillow off Dean’s head, and he put his hand over his eyes, saying, “What is your problem?” He sounded like a teenager.

  I threw the pillow back at him, and felt my voice rise up out of me. “I am not your mother asking you to mow the lawn! This is not a Saturday-morning chore! You fucking promised you’d fucking help me with this fucking garage sale, you fucking asshole!” I walked out, slamming the door so hard the knob fell out and hit the floor. I expected him to scramble out after me, but he didn’t.

  And then I was back in the yard, alone again, spreading sheets out on the grass for the knickknacks, figuring at least a blue chambray background was better than nothing. Whatever tears were coming, I was wiping away fast. I could figure this out. I could make this work. I waddled to the garage with my sights set on the potted banana tree. It dragged okay on the concrete, but the grass put a stop to any forward motion. I got down on my knees and pushed. Nothing. Then I tilted the pot over and began to roll it across the yard. It was working! The potting soil was spilling, but it was working! At the very least, the banana tree would be done.

  And it was there, with pregnant me on my knees in the grass, that a voice came out of nowhere.

  “Need some help?”

  I looked up to see a man in his pajamas. Blue cotton bottoms, a white undershirt, and some Tevas. He had super-short brown hair that was starting to gray at the temples. He wore tortoiseshell spectacles. And he was waiting for a reply. I pushed myself up into a kind of kneeling squat.

  But before I could even speak, he bent over, lifted this plant that must have weighed seventy-five pounds as if it were a kitchen herb, and set it down near the sidewalk. I want to say he lifted it one-handed, but I’m not sure that’s true.

  I worked my way up to standing.

  “What else can I do?” he said.

  “You’re awfully chipper for this hour of the morning.”

  “You bet.”

  “Are you here for the garage sale?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m here for my dog.”

  I looked over and saw a golden retriever, unleashed, peeing in my bushes.

  “I’m Gardner. I’m your neighbor,” the man said.

  “I’m Jenny.” We shook hands. Mine was wet from dew, and I felt self-conscious about it.

  “I’ve seen you before, waddling around.”

  “Thanks for the image.”

  “I live in that house,” he said, pointing at one a few houses down that had been sold as a fixer-upper. I’d been watching its slow transformation: sanded and repainted, window screens restored, roof replaced, new driveway.

  I had been so relieved to see the house being restored instead of stripped down and updated. Lots of people moved into this neighborhood and, for example, just ripped out the “old” windows in their historic houses and replaced them with flimsy aluminum things that were newer and far, far cheaper. The windows went, the wood siding got replaced with vinyl, the simple porch railings came off to make way for froofy, neo-Victorian spindles that did not at all match. And suddenly, the old house was gone, replaced by a bad imitation of its former self.

  But the guy with this house, he knew what he was doing.

  “Oh!” I said. “I was afraid that house would be a teardown.”

  “It probably was,” he said, shrugging. “Sometimes I’m a sucker.”

  “Maybe you should work on that,” I offered.

  “Maybe I will. But probably not until I finish helping you haul stuff out of your garage.”

  “In your pajamas?”

  “In my pajamas.”

  I looked around for his dog, who was now perched on my front porch like a lion.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Herman,” he said.

  “Good name,” I said. And with that, he followed me back to the garage.

  He moved coffee table after file cabinet after moldy ottoman while I arranged the knickknacks properly on the tables he’d set up. He was like a superhero. He even dragged Dean’s recliner out of the living room for me. I’m tempted to say he did it all one-handed, too, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t.

  My helpful, early-bird neighbor. I’d already forgotten his name.

  When he returned from my garage with a cast-iron typewriter under one arm and a leopard-print beanbag chair under the other, I said, “You’re a heck of a neighbor.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” he said.

  I was still putting on price tags. Pricing in advance is the key to a good garage sale. If you get lazy an
d decide to just make something up when someone finds that Niagara Falls lamp in the cardboard box, you’ll wind up charging twenty-five cents. It’s hard to demand money from people. Especially from people shopping at your house, in your front yard, pawing through your things. It’s not just your merchandise out there on the lawn. It’s your life. You charge a quarter, your customer forks it over, and everybody’s happy. And at the end of the day, you have fifty bucks to show for your labor.

  You are in charge at a garage sale, but you are also vulnerable. And desperate for a sale. In that split second, as you make up the price, you know that they know that you’re making up the price. Judgments about your stuff—and, more important, you as a person—follow. Who doesn’t want to be a good person?

  Better to start with a price tag, even if you come way down off the price. Then you can feel like a good person for taking less, but still make some cash. Of course, some people don’t need to feel good about themselves. The first garage sale I ever had, my mother made four hundred dollars for me off ten items. She drove a hard bargain.

  This morning, I was using tricks of display to lure people: everything neat, easy to see, easy to pick up and look at. Clothes hung symmetrically on portable racks by numerical size. Furniture sat in prominent spots on the lawn. Big signs taped to the tree and front porch beckoned people over. Things were coming together.

  And then Meredith arrived to act as a pretend shopper. She wanted to create bidding wars with people, but I insisted she hold back. It was early for her, and she had the puffy eyes of a girl who’d had a good date the night before.

  “How was your date with Dr. Blandon?” I asked.

  “Disaster,” she said, leaning in and kissing me on the nose. “But I might be in love.”

  “You’re always in love,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Always and never.”

  Meredith had been slouching a little, but as my neighbor walked over to us across the yard, she straightened.

  “Nice pajamas,” she said, and headed off to categorize my CDs by genre.

  “You have a lot of stuff,” he said to me.

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  “I may come back later and shop,” he said.

  “Your money’s no good here,” I said. “Just come back and take things.”

  Then he said, “How were you planning on getting all that stuff out of your garage, anyway?”

  “I was planning on having some help,” I said.

  “And that help—”

  “Is fast asleep in our bed.”

  “Ah,” he said. And then, almost under his breath, “Good help is hard to find.”

  He headed back to the garage. I stood next to Meredith as she watched him go. She gave an appreciative “Umphh!”

  I looked at her.

  “I thought you were in love,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said, fingering a feather boa dangling from a rack. “I forgot.”

  The sky was lighter now. It was almost six-thirty and the die-hard garage-salers, the ones who knew that the best stuff can disappear before the sale even opens, were arriving. The yard started to fill up, people tromping across the grass like folks at a fairground, and my neighbor was up on my porch, just about to wake his dog and head home, when my mother sped up in her shiny black SUV and hit the brakes in the driveway.

  It was always so funny to see my five-foot-one mother slide down out of that car. This morning, she zipped up to the porch with a red scarf around her neck, a tray of take-out coffee in one hand, and said, “I know, I know! I’m late! But I’ve got coffee. Decaf for you. Latte for Dean.” She handed Dean’s to my neighbor without noticing and turned to scan the crowd. “And pure plain black coffee for me, the only way my daddy ever let anybody have it.”

  She paused then and looked at my neighbor.

  “You’re not Dean,” she said.

  “No, ma’am,” he said.

  “He’s my neighbor,” I offered. “He’s helping with the heavy stuff.”

  “In his pajamas!” Meredith shouted, walking over from the sweater box.

  “In his pajamas,” my mother said.

  My neighbor handed back the coffee.

  “And Dean is?” She looked at me.

  “Indisposed,” I said.

  My mother nodded and handed the cup straight over to Meredith, saying, “Sweetie, you look like you could use it.” She gave Meredith a kiss on the cheek and then wiped off her lipstick print with her thumb.

  The yard was buzzing like a hive now. It was time for me to start watching for the shoplifters and the price-tag switchers. My mother led my neighbor off to help her carry the Exercycle she was contributing, and I stood guard on the porch steps, fanny pack atop my giant belly and Herman the sleeping dog at my feet.

  When my neighbor was finally gone, after far too many thanks from me, my mother said, “He’s adorable.”

  She refrained from making any comments about my sleeping fiancé. Instead, we chatted about her latest clients, a nouveau-riche couple who had no taste. None at all.

  “That’s where you come in,” I said. “That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

  She agreed. But they were fighting her every step of the way. They wanted overstuffed furniture. They wanted every piece in the living room to match—“A living room suite!” she shrieked, as if they wanted a bed of nails. They had an unfortunate penchant for the color maroon, and they consistently picked the ugliest fabric from any group of swatches.

  “It’s no fun when you have to work so hard,” she said.

  “That can be said of many things.”

  She wasn’t staying long, and as she headed back out to the car, I remembered something I’d been wanting to ask. “Are you and Dad fighting?” I shouted across the lawn.

  “Me and who?”

  “Dad.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t talked to him since—I don’t know. Ages.”

  “He called and asked about you yesterday. How you were doing. I thought you must be fighting.”

  “Nope,” she said, and she climbed up into her car.

  By ten o’clock, the only remaining piece of furniture was Dean’s recliner—which, at “free,” was apparently priced too high—and my tables and the clothes racks were half empty. It was time to put up the EVERYTHING ½ OFF! sign. My fanny pack had gotten so full that I’d had to lock big handfuls of money inside the house two separate times. I was still carrying a feeling of uneasiness about Dean, but the day was pleasant—sunny, cool, a slight breeze—and I’d made at least a thousand dollars, so that was something.

  Meredith and I sat on the porch swing and watched the stragglers paw through what was left. My ankles were swollen, and Meredith kept talking about them.

  “You have no ankles!” she said. “They’re like Coke cans.”

  “They’re creepy, aren’t they?”

  She had haggled with people for me all morning. She had rearranged hats and sweaters to make them look pretty. She had insisted that I stay off my feet as much as possible. And, more than that, she was having a great time. I found myself feeling glad that Dean had slept in. He would only have been grouchy.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” Meredith said, stuffing the fanny pack with money after a lady had bought a plastic goose lamp. She paused in front of me on the swing.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m not quite sure how to phrase it.”

  “Just throw something out,” I said, “and then we can revise.”

  She looked at me. She shifted her weight. Then she said, “I don’t like babies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t like them.”

  “You don’t like them?”

  “I don’t like to be around them. I’m not interested in them. And everybody I’ve ever known who’s had a baby has become a total moron.”

  I swung a little. “Those are some feelings.”

  She nodded.

 
“So, you’re thinking you won’t like my baby?”

  “It’s possible.”

  I thought about it. “I think you’ll like my baby,” I said after a minute. “Nobody likes other people’s babies. But I’m not other people.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  A guy wanted to know how much my bowling ball was. Meredith went into a spiel about how it had been owned by a South Texas bowling champ in the 1960s. He wound up paying about ten dollars too much. Meredith turned back to me and waved the money before she tucked it away.

  “You have to like my baby,” I said.

  “I’ll give it my best shot,” she said. Then she took off her sunglasses and wiped the lenses on her shirt. “I’m just saying it doesn’t look good.”

  Right around eleven-thirty, Dean woke up. He showed up on the porch, still in his clothes from the night before, which were wrinkled and emitting a thick odor of cigars. His boxers were edging up out of his waistband. He did not appear to have brushed his teeth. There he stood, hungover, unshaven, squinting. He was drinking a cup of coffee, undoubtedly from the pot I’d brewed for him at 5:00 A.M.—now a kind of burned black soup.

  “Morning, ladies,” he said with a hoarse voice that made Meredith turn her head away. “What can I do to help?”

  6

  I stayed mad at Dean all day. What I hadn’t expected was that he—inexplicably and against all logic—was mad, too.

  I planned to pout, and refuse to meet his gaze, and give him the silent treatment all day while he marinated in guilt for the way he’d let me down. I’d expected him to start groveling as soon as he woke up. I had been counting on him! Though he made a lot of mistakes with me, he usually followed them up with apologies, sucking up, gifts, or tender, thoughtful Ladies’ Nite sex.

  Not this time. No sex, no gifts, and absolutely no apologies.

  He was polite and slightly cold as we finished up the garage sale. Then we piled everything that hadn’t sold in the back of my Jeep to take to the Salvation Army. Meredith took off with an air kiss as soon as she glimpsed how unpleasant the rest of the day was going to be.

  In the car on the way there, his unwanted recliner hanging out the back and secured with rope, I wondered if Dean was grumpy because there had been no takers for it. And, insult to injury, we were donating the thing to charity rather than just dragging it back inside. I wondered if his feelings might be hurt. Was it possible that he felt a special kinship with that stained velour found-by-the-road-on-trashday chair?